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Considerations for Integrating Pardot + Sitecore

Considerations for Integrating Pardot + Sitecore

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Sitecore is a powerful website Content Management System (CMS), and we can use Sitecore and Pardot together to great effect. There are a few Sitecore capabilities that compliment Pardot, and a few features that work well in conjunction with Pardot.

Pardot and Sitecore language management workflow

Sitecore has language management workflows that allow us to build multi-language websites more robustly. To best take advantage of these workflows, we will want to use Pardot Form Handlers so we can allow Sitecore to manage the form presentation language.

Having a Pardot form handler accept all the form fills from that form across all the languages simplifies processes in Pardot and reduces errors due to operating in unfamiliar languages. We will want to have Sitecore pass along the current language in use as a hidden field. Now we can have Pardot send emails in the correct language.

Using the language that was passed in by the form and dynamic content, we can create autoresponder emails in the correct language.

Working with country segments

Organizations that work with multiple languages tend to be organized by country and think in country segmentations. This is natural as there are some very real legal and organizational country divisions which we operate in.

We tend to see Pardot organized this same way, with country content and folders inside Pardot with a language overlay. If we instead flip this approach and try to structure Pardot around Language first, and then apply a country overlay, we can reduce duplication of effort inside Pardot greatly. You write a single language copy, then use Pardot dynamic content to ‘pull in’ that country/region-specific contact information or footer at the bottom of the email.

There are 34 million native Spanish speakers in Spain and 36 million native Spanish speakers in the USA. By operating Pardot-language-centric first, the USA marketing team doesn’t need to worry about Spanish language content for their audience as Spain already took care of it. The end-user gets a much better user experience, working in their native/more comfortable language. 

We can build a powerful search infrastructure that allows Sitecore to ‘search’ within Pardot documents by having a copy of the Pardot files documents in Sitecore. We search these docs using the search tool, but deliver the Pardot file URL when we present the download link to the web user.  This will take some tweaking to deliver a URL other than what we have in place on the server.

Using for gated content

We can use this for gated content as well. When we have gated content Pardot form (handler)s, we can pass in the Pardot File URL and Pardot document name as hidden fields. When we send an autoresponder email, we can use these two fields plus the hidden language field to allow people to download Pardot Files from a Sitecore website search in their local language. 

Page actions

Pardot Page Actions are a great tool and can allow Marketing to action content without needing to get the web team involved. The website team can do their thing, and the Pardot team can do our thing, and we can build great experiences together working our own strengths.

Some ideas to use Page Actions could be if somebody visits an important event page on our website, but doesn’t sign up. We can then action them in Pardot to encourage participation in that event.

Sitecore Experience Manager and xDB – Sitecore CRM Integration

While we don’t have a native Pardot and Sitecore connector, Sitecore has a couple of Salesforce CRM integration tools available to us. We can take advantage of this with our Pardot usage as well. Sitecore can collect the form data as it goes to Pardot, so Sitecore knows the just-prospects. And once we convert those to Leads & Contacts, we again have the ability for Sitecore and Pardot to update each other.

We can do ABM type content presentation on Sitecore and have Pardot send the same content types by email. That elusive omni-channel.

We can take advantage of the language workflows mentioned above for simplifying Pardot Language support, but that would force us to use Form Handlers, which means we lose Pardot Progressive Profiling. However, we can build this in Sitecore Experience Manager ourselves using the data we sync over from the CRM or that we already have in Sitecore for non-CRM records.

Conclusion

When utilized properly, Sitecore and Pardot can work together to offer great rewards. If you have questions about a Sitecore + Pardot integration, our Pardot development and engineering team would love to dive in with you on a solution.

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  • Mike Creuzer is one of the Pardot marketing experts at Sercante, focusing on the 'hard' bits of Pardot and Salesforce. He bends Pardot to his will and integrates it with other tools, and he connects the massive marcom stack together in useful ways. Cruezer is a chronic tinkerer and fixer and blends all the hobbies together.

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